Greg Barker (2017)
Greg Barker’s film joins the ranks of recent documentaries whose meanings were transformed by events that occurred during or shortly after the making of them – The Queen of Versailles (2012), The Armstrong Lie (2013), Weiner (2016). Barker clearly conceived The Final Year as a valedictory celebration of the Obama administration’s foreign policy, confident that, by the time filming was completed, Barack Obama’s legacy would be more or less safe in the hands of Hillary Clinton. If she had won the presidential election, Barker’s documentary would amount to little more than a description of the attractive, impressive personalities and hard work of the people to whom he and his crew had access. They include, as well as the President, senior members of his foreign policy team – Secretary of State John Kerry, Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes. If Clinton were now in the White House, the film would likely have the quality of a public relations exercise for the Obama presidency – reasonably engaging (for political liberals anyway) but, as PR, surplus to requirements because it’s effectively retrospective. Yet thanks to what happened in November 2016 (ten months into the twelve that end when the Trump team is on the point of taking over), The Final Year has a vector of tragedy.
The emotional power of the film doesn’t depend entirely on Trump. John Kerry’s presence supplied a growing regret in this viewer that he didn’t become President in 2004. To reinforce recognition of the clarity and integrity of his political voice, Barker includes footage of the twenty-seven-year-old Kerry delivering his Vietnam Veterans Against the War evidence to the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1971. Samantha Power’s visits to Africa are variously shocking – from her meetings in a Nigerian refugee camp with women and children driven from their homes by Boko Haram to the upsetting death of a young boy in Cameroon, accidentally killed when he ran in front of the UN Ambassador’s motorcade. But Ben Rhodes’s immediate reaction to Trump’s win is poignant too. ‘Just trying to process this’, he says to the camera, ‘there’s a lot to process …’ Words then repeatedly fail this exceptionally articulate man. Struck dumb, he is The Final Year’s most eloquent image.
Ben Rhodes is also responsible for a couple of the more light-hearted moments. He and his bag of work make a meal of squeezing into the back of a car. Greg Barker does a close-up of the plastic coffee cups and water bottles in Rhodes’s waste bin – as if humorously questioning the administration’s environmentalist credentials. Rhodes’s major part in the film does, though, raise questions about the relatively little screen time given to his boss Susan Rice, the National Security Advisor. There are no scenes of interaction between Rice and the President; while there are sign-off bits featuring Obama, Kerry, Power and Rhodes, there isn’t one for Rice. Perhaps Barker thought it would look odd to include her deputy and exclude her entirely from The Final Year but the effect of Rice’s minor contribution is unfortunate: this seems like another token movie role for a woman of colour.
While Barker’s film is designed for a pro-Obama audience, supporters of the new US administration can enjoy it too. They’ll feel vindicated by the exclusive concentration on foreign rather than domestic policy – nothing is said about the effect of ‘global engagement’ on American jobs and quality of life. But a majority of viewers (after all, a majority of Americans voted for Hillary Clinton) will surely feel nostalgic. Although the outgoing team talks gamely about the pendulum eventually swinging back in their direction, it’s hard, for now, to do more than agree with Ben Rhodes that there’s a lot to process. The election night sequences in The Final Year, as Samantha Power welcomes Madeleine Albright, Gloria Steinem et al to a glass-ceiling-breaking celebration party, revive the sense that what happened then can’t really have happened. It’s a matter of coming to terms both with Obama’s political legacy being jeopardised and with the astonishing nature of the creature elected to succeed him – not just any old Republican reactionary but, to quote Louis Menand’s description of Trump in a recent New Yorker piece, a ‘toxic nitwit’.
21 January 2018
